Picture January 2026.

The exec team opens the year with new priorities. A new AI initiative. A new market push. A new retention effort. Everyone agrees they matter. Everyone’s already at capacity. No one asks what’s coming off the list.

Your company doesn’t lack ideas. It’s overloaded with work that never finished and never ended. That’s the real execution risk going into 2026. Not what you haven’t started. What you won’t stop.

Execution risk builds when work only ever gets added

Most leadership teams talk about execution problems as capacity issues. Too much work. Too few people. Too many dependencies.

What actually happens is simpler. Work keeps entering the system. Almost nothing leaves.

Every new initiative adds coordination. More meetings. More updates. More handoffs. Time spent working gets replaced by time spent managing work. Effort increases while output slows.

Strategy decks talk about focus. Calendars show the truth.

The teams that win in 2026 won’t be the ones that start the most work. They’ll be the ones that end the most work early and cleanly.

Here’s the test. If headcount stayed flat next year, what work would end in the next 90 days?

The cost of “just one more thing”

Leaders say it all the time. “It’s just one more thing.”

It never is.

Every new priority pulls in meetings, approvals, dependencies, and status checks. That cost rarely gets discussed. It lands on the same people already stretched thin.

Sustained pressure changes behavior in predictable ways. Decisions get simplified. Quality drops. Rework increases. Long-term thinking fades. Execution looks busy and still fails.

You can see this forming long before targets slip. Ownership language weakens. Corrections multiply. Commitment turns into hedging. Systems like Workplace surface these patterns early because execution failure always shows up in behavior before it shows up in numbers.

If 2026 needs to look different, focus won’t get you there by itself. Subtraction will.

That requires a stop-doing list with the same authority as your roadmap.

Seven things to stop before 2026

1. Stop starting new cross-functional work without ending something else

Most leadership teams add work the same way. A new idea gets proposed. It sounds important. Everyone agrees. Work begins. Nothing gets removed.

That approach doesn’t scale.

Every cross-functional initiative pulls time, meetings, and attention from multiple teams. When nothing stops, the cost shows up everywhere else as delays, rework, and exhaustion.

Set a simple rule. No new cross-functional work starts unless a specific project is paused, ended, or pushed out. Say it clearly in the meeting. Write it down. Communicate it to the teams involved.

If there’s no agreement on what ends, the new work doesn’t begin.

This works because it treats time and focus as limited, not abstract.

2. Stop letting stalled projects linger

Every company has work that’s been “in progress” for months with no real momentum behind it. No one wants to be the person who ends it, so it stays.

That work drains capacity, creates friction, and confuses people about priorities.

Set expectations early. For each major initiative, define what progress should look like by specific dates. Decide in advance what signals mean it should pause, change, or end, and who makes that call.

When those signals appear, review happens automatically. No drama. No blame. Just a decision.

3. Stop treating everything as urgent

Urgency has a place. Outages. Legal risk. Critical customer issues.

Using it constantly makes it meaningless.

Set a clear standard. When something is labeled urgent, three answers come with it immediately. What stops. Who absorbs the impact. When recovery happens.

If those answers aren’t clear, the work waits.

Within a few months, urgency starts to mean something again, and people trust it.

4. Stop hiding execution risk in calendars and chat tools

Lagging metrics tell you what already happened. Revenue, churn, and annual engagement scores show damage after it’s done.

Execution risk shows up earlier in daily behavior. After-hours volume increases. Tone shifts. Ownership language fades. Rework repeats.

Workplace turns these signals into live indicators for burnout, alignment, and execution risk. Ignoring that data while claiming execution matters doesn’t hold up.

Review it regularly. Look at where rework clusters. Where ownership drops. Where pressure keeps landing on the same teams.

That’s where the system is failing.

5. Stop rewarding people for absorbing too much work

Organizations praise people who always say yes. Late nights. Constant availability. Saving broken projects.

That teaches the wrong lesson. Hiding the cost of work becomes the path to success.

Shift what gets rewarded. Recognize leaders who reduce scope to protect quality. Highlight teams that deliver without weekend work. Back managers who push back when capacity is real.

People pay attention to what earns status. That’s what shapes behavior.

6. Stop treating burnout as a personal issue

When the same teams are exhausted over and over, the cause isn’t individual resilience. It’s how work is designed.

Burnout tracks to specific patterns. Too many commitments. No tradeoffs. Timelines that only move forward. No planned recovery.

Stop sending those teams to training. Look at how work enters their system. Put all their major commitments on one page.

Then ask a direct question. If half of this stopped, would results suffer, or would quality improve?

The answer points straight to where execution risk lives.

7. Stop measuring culture once a year

Annual surveys move too slowly for the pace ahead.

Culture shows up every day in how people talk, decide, challenge, and follow through. Those patterns shift long before survey scores do.

Workplace tracks these signals and turns them into live measures of execution risk, burnout, and alignment. Used well, they function like operational data.

When risk rises in one group, you can intervene early. When alignment language drifts, you can correct it before confusion spreads. When recognition drops, you can act before retention does.

Leaders who treat culture as a live system will outpace those waiting for an annual report.

What leadership needs to do in 2026

Leadership isn’t about adding the next priority. It’s about deciding what ends.

A real stop-doing list has owners, dates, and clear signals that show whether it’s working. It changes how work enters the system and how effort turns into results.

Before approving another initiative, ask a harder question.

If nothing comes off the list, are we leading, or just shifting the burden onto the same stretched teams and hoping they hold?

Markets don’t usually beat companies outright. Internal drag does.

You still have time to write a different 2026 story. It starts with a real stop-doing list and the discipline to back it up with live signals that show where execution is holding and where it’s breaking.

Start there. Everything else is noise.